


an awful lot of nothing

by BlackCats



Category: Dangan Ronpa, Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Another Episode
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Pre-DRAE, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2018-02-19 19:45:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2400662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackCats/pseuds/BlackCats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Speculation was cheap, and Komaru's time was practically free.<br/>(Komaru, silence, and routine.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	an awful lot of nothing

For a prison cell, it was homey and plush, with all the trappings of modern comfort—extra emphasis on “trap”. Komaru cared little for it now, but it was not like that, before.

_Before…_

It seemed like a dream to her. A brother, a mother, a father. They lived in a modest apartment with a pleasant view and home-cooked meals and quarreled about who got to use the bathroom first in the mornings. Makoto would fidget with his pencil in a different way each day, depending on what subject was confusing him most; their mother would laugh and their father would pat his shoulder reassuringly and Komaru would take it upon herself to pretend to know the answers just so he’d complete his work sooner.

She was forgetting their voices, already. She cared a lot about that.

The view from the window never changed much. Sometimes the rain would wash the skyline gray, and she liked to hear that, hear the gentle murmur or the harsh howling of the wind and water depending on the season. She never got to contemplate throwing herself out to meet that sky, since the iron bars were stout and strong and she had no way to break them.

She was grateful for that, really. It took a potential option out of her hands and thus out of her thoughts.

Komaru would push her fingers through the pages of assorted magazines—it struck her as odd that this lone fashion series would be presented to her at periodic intervals, but she didn’t question it—taking in the exotic styles and varying colors that represented a world utterly detached from her cell. It didn’t matter to her much in the end. The only thing she ever wore was her school uniform, after all. It was routine. It offered her some form of vague comfort, like maybe one morning she’d wake up from this exceptionally long dream and find her brother and mother and father right where they’re supposed to be.

She never got her hopes up though. Miracles were not something she’d hold out for.

The steel door served as exercise equipment of sorts. She’d attack it with vigor daily, pounding her fists and screaming and rattling the handle. Komaru didn’t think she’d be able to break it—same as those bars. She just wanted to hear something… _anything_. The resounding clang of unyielding metal, the shrieking of her own voice, they were welcome disturbances to the quiet. A few minutes of that, and she’d return to doing something else.

Her captors never said or did anything. She wondered often who they were, and why she was here—speculation was cheap, and Komaru’s time was practically free.

Philosophy and deep, worldly matters occupied her thoughts when musings on her situation were not. She’d sit and stare out the window, or at her posters, or at nothing in particular; she liked to think that her conclusions were intelligent and clever, since she was not a part of regular society and had an outsider’s viewpoint of things.

There was no way for her to connect to the world beyond. She might as well have been dead.

Some mornings Komaru would lay in bed and ignore her alarm clock, ignore the schedule she made for herself that added some semblance of normalcy to her days, since it was only in her dreams that she heard and saw anything from her life before. Sometimes she wanted to just fall asleep forever.

And whenever she started having these thoughts, she’d grab her MP3 player and blast music until her eardrums hurt.

She wouldn’t give up. Her captors would not have that satisfaction.

And so time passed. A lonely year and a half, wherein holidays were spent with a forced sort of festivity via decorations she made herself.

(Though one day…one single day…she received a bright red rose on Christmas, via the food slot, and now the color red always made her wonder.)

Complacency was a dangerous word, Komaru thought to herself as she reclined back in her chair with one of the numerous bottles of water from the fridge. But if she did not grow complacent, she would grow mad, and that simply was not an option.

She did everything boredom would drive one to do when all alone in one place for an extended period of time; she expected nothing, and heard nothing, and saw nothing, and learned  _nothing_ —she had an awful lot of nothing in her hands and no way to fill them. She accepted this, and that was okay, since it _had_ to be.

Confinement could be nothing else but nothing.

But then—

A miracle, against all odds, destroying her empty _nothing_ and replacing it with  _something_  because there was a knock at the door for the first time since _before_.

**Author's Note:**

> I love Komaru, and DRAE, so expect some stuff from me once there's more translations abound!


End file.
